The direct mail letter is geared to a highly specific audience and serves a very specific task.
In a direct mail letter you need to tell a story about your organization and let the reader know who you are and what it is you do.
It takes a specially trained writer to put together a well written and effective direct mail piece. Don’t fall into the ever present “I can do this myself and save a few bucks” trap. A well written direct mail piece, put together by a professional with experience will pay for itself and then some.
Denny Hatch, an excellent copywriter and direct mail expert himself, suggests the following four tips from Herschell Gordon Lewis for the direct mail writer. These four tips were found in Denny Hatch’s his latest edition of his enewsletter “Business Common Sense” from the Target Marketing Group.
* Inject yourself inside the brain of your typical target. Using this simple formula, I’ve written many a package as a woman, as a member of an ethnic or religious or political or philosophical group to which I don’t belong or subscribe, as a plain ol’ country boy. The process parallels “Method Acting.â€
* Don’t show off for your peer group. (I hate that term.)One reason so many writers of “conventional†advertising fail as direct marketers is their insistence on showing the reader (or viewer or listener) how clever they are, or how huge a vocabulary they can command. This is a horrendous mistake.
Yoav